Irishman Max Morden, grieving the death of his wife, Anna, returns to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child, and finds himself engulfed in thoughts and memories of a momentous summer spent with the vacationing Grace family, his life with Anna, and his relationship with his grown daughter.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child -- a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well -- heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddeness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins -- Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless -- in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the "barely bearable raw immediacy" of his childhood memories.

Max Morden visits the seaside town where he spent his summers as a child after the death of his wife. There he remembers the Graces, the family that introduced him to a world of feeling he'd never experienced before. Interwoven with this story are Morden's memories of his wife, Anna--of their life together, of her death.